When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 3G, a lot of people - journalists and analysts, and plain observers - thought he looked thin. The questions didn't quite go away, but Apple insisted that there was no question of a reoccurence of the rare form of pancreatic cancer that he'd been diagnosed with - and, as best we know, cured of - four years ago.

(It was a rare form - islet cell cancer - which is treatable: normally, pancreatic cancer is a very short death sentence, with a six-month timescale.)

Then when he didn't appear in the latest financial results, people got talking again - although Jobs hardly ever turns up in those, either; he leaves it to people like Tim Cook, the chief operating officer and Peter Oppenheimer, the chief financial officer. If he's there it usually means it's bad news. So his non-appearance was a good thing all round.

Apple said he was fine. And we thought that was it. Except that now John Markoff in the New York Times has an intriguing story which says that

People who are close to Mr. Jobs say that he had a surgical procedure this year to address a problem that was contributing to a loss of weight. These people declined to be identified because Mr. Jobs had not authorized them to speak about his health.

The reason why seems to be, putting the clues together, that Jobs had the Whipple procedure (follow the link for explanatory photos) to remove the cancer - which involves considerable rearrangement of your internal organs. As the Fortune blog notes,

The Whipple procedure, named for Allen Oldfather Whipple, the American doctor who perfected it in the 1930s, is a complex, Rube Goldberg-type operation in which surgeons remove the right-most section, or "head," of the pancreas - as well as the gallbladder, part of the stomach, the lower half of the bile duct, and part of the small intestine - and then reassemble the whole thing in a new configuration. The severed surfaces of the stomach, bile duct, and remaining pancreas are stitched to the small intestine so that what's left of the pancreas can continue to supply insulin and digestive enzymes.

You can imagine that that would have some effect on how well you're able to digest your food. Add to that the fact that Jobs is famously a
vegan
pescatarian [eats fish and vegetables], and you have a recipe for weight loss. But weight loss you don't really want.

Perhaps we need to put out a fact sheet on the Whipple procedure to Wall Street:

"Every client call today I've had has brought up the health issue," said Charles Wolf, a securities analyst at Needham & Company.... "These are material questions given that his footprint is all over the company," said A. M. Sacconaghi Jr., a securities analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "The fact is, if you're a C.E.O. of a public company you're a public figure."

So we're clearer now: Jobs is healthy, inasmuch as you can be after a Whipple procedure. But you can bet that if there's one person who can afford really good health care, it's a billionaire.